Story for performance #437
webcast from London at 07:49PM, 31 Aug 06

it is a fixed menu
Source: Warren Hoge, ‘Israel rebuffs request to lift Lebanon blockade’, New York Times in International Herald Tribune online, 31/08/06.
Writer/s: Alexandra Keller

The train was stopped in New Haven switching from electric to diesel.

Two charming, cosmopolitan older ladies sat to my left. Their conversation made it impossible to tell whether they had just met under the big clock in Penn Station or had known each other since the one in the green dress and impeccable chignon had emigrated from Vienna via Auschwitz.

‘Do you ever go to the Met?’

‘Oh yes, we have season tickets to the opera.’

But later:

‘Mitzi isn’t doing very well.’

‘Yes, she’s had a few falls lately.’

A baby, old enough to walk, cried at the rear of the car, a cry that made you sure something specific troubled her, so no one took offense. That other earsplitting shriek-for-no-reason-in-particular drives me nuts. It also embarrasses me because I was just that sort of inexplicably colicky baby, and the me that I drove crazy as infant might be the woman in green.

In front of me was a balding man who’d taken his lunch at 11:30 this morning, just as we were pulling into New Rochelle. The menu fixed in the window was a bag of chips and a Diet Coke, but the smell was a cross between a cheeseburger and cream of bilgewater soup.

Between the baby and the pair of gentlewomen sounded to be a man with a tracheotomy. For an hour after we left New York there was a variation on a cough that didn’t quite seem to be emerging from a mouth. Eventually he began chatting to a fellow across the aisle from him in that gravelly gasp of people who have started to pay the piper for their life-long allegiance to Marlboro. The scratching wheeze had the effect of nearly obliterating any other aspect of the grain of the voice. I assumed he was quite advanced in years, but I could have been wrong. Whatever it was, his accent was gone. The geographically tell-tale swoops, lolls, skips and trickles had been replaced by an entirely mechanically based syncopation. I suspect he would have spoken Chinese the same way.

This voice was exactly the opposite of the unsettling blandness of computer-generated ones, like the voice we think of as Stephen Hawking. This was brought home to me by the conductor’s walkie-talkie which, when not used to communicate with other conductors, issued a non-stop mechanical vocal report on the track condition ahead. It was a voice of authority compromised only somewhat by emanating from the trainman’s hip rather than his mouth. ‘Berlin. 74 degrees. No defect.’ The report, though clearly optimal, was nevertheless disturbing. ‘No defect?’ Was one expected?

Between the surgically and the technologically abstracted voices, there was a strange duet occurring at regular intervals. It started and stopped so often that it began to seem like an experimental pop song in heavy rotation.

‘When I was a boy, rasp, rasp, soda (rasp) was only a raaasp nickel.’

‘Berlin. 74 degrees. No defect.’

‘You could raaassp, Berlin. Get a whole—rasp—lunch, 74 degrees. For a raasp dollar. No defect.’

No defect indeed. Between the impeccable machine speak there was also plenty of static, but the duet remained, in its audition, contrapuntal.

Through the window I saw we’d left not only the New York metropolitan area but the inner circle of commuter suburbs as well. Not long before, we’d been chugging up a brief spit of coastline, an hors d’oeuvre of murky blue-grey and sandy seascape before a main course of gently verdant hills punctuated by rusty, staggering cities at the brink of bankruptcy. Their citizens sat outside their crumbling housing projects watching the train go by. Citizen and traveler regarded each other, and given the distance between us, and the angle of the sun, we were to them perhaps no faces at all, only the glint of sunlight off glass, and it was only we—or I—who made up fragments of biography for sweaty women taking washing off fraying clotheslines and restless children climbing through burned out cars. Not that the charmingly named two-word towns like Cos Cob, Green’s Farms and Noroton Heights didn’t also evoke fantasy with their tree-lined streets, freshly painted store fronts, gold-lettered signs and expensive cars lined up neatly in the commuter parking lot. Cos Cob seemed so enchantingly and yet casually named that I was sure its children were born knowing which was the salad fork. Cos Cob…more of a nickname, really, as if the town were actually named Coswick Cobberton III, but nobody stood on ceremony because nobody had to, and we’re all friends here, really.

The long lines of trees that fronted small forests were both intensely green and under attack. Any tree of age or substance had been invaded by tent caterpillars, Gypsy moths, or some other ambitious pest. Every deciduous tree for miles wore a coy white veil that was really an icky bug settling in for the all-you-can-eat buffet and a long summer’s nap. This year the elms, maples, dogwoods, birch and everything else deciduous were fairly free of scavengers and interlopers, so the wide variety of shades of green was fully visible. For the most part they blended together in a single whoosh in the foreground; the middle ground was full of squares of green from lime to moss, depending on whether they were someone’s well-manicured backyard or a modest crop of corn or a grazing field for a quartet of horses; and the background did not change at all, so long as one kept one’s eye on a distant tree, a church spire, or the sun itself. Inevitably one looked down to recross one’s legs, check one’s watch, scratch an itch. Looking up again, the orientation point was gone and a whole new backdrop presented itself.

Adapted for performance by Barbara Campbell from a story by Alexandra Keller.